Hannah Leighton-Boyce began her residency with Darwen Terracotta in 2019, working through 2020, 2021 and the beginning of 2022.

The necessary extended nature of her placement allowed the artist to explore a range of ideas and reflect on working in a factory in that moment; considering what it means to work slowly and with care in this context, and to reflect on being ‘unproductive’ in a highly productive setting.

Hannah became familiar with the workforce at Darwen Terracotta, life on the factory floor and the making culture of a company where the pace is held in balance between demand, manual production and the material properties of the slip casting process.

Throughout the embedded residency, Hannah’s work developed with consideration towards objects that have a supportive function and material remnants that hold this memory in their form and surface; impressions often caused by the processes of pressing, settling, slipping, and yielding of one material and/or action and another.

Among the works presented were curved plaster forms made by the process of ‘running’ plaster, which consider articulations and gestures of the body within space. The profiles were taken from hand tools, and the length of the forms were made within the artist’s reach – but where forms interconnect, they slid apart telescopically and extended beyond the body like an architectural prosthesis.